Frederic Wehrey

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research deals with armed conflict, security sectors, and identity politics, with a focus on Libya, North Africa, and the Gulf. 

His commentary and articles appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Mediterranean Politics, and the Journal of Democracy. He has been interviewed by major media outlets such as NPR, ABC News, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and the BBC. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations and has testified before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

He is the author of The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), which the New York Times called “the essential text on the country’s disintegration.” His previous book, Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings (Columbia University Press, 2013), was named a “Best Book on the Middle East” by Foreign Affairs magazine in 2014.

Before joining Carnegie, Wehrey served as a twenty-one year veteran of the active and reserve components of the U.S. Air Force, with tours across the Middle East and North Africa.

He holds a doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University and a Master’s in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He studied Arabic at Cairo University, the University of Jordan, and the Yemen Language Center in Sana’a.